u/SoManyCrafts wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
We actually do have all of those things at Codesmith as well. There is work done on narratives, there is an entire DSA course (and daily hack hours), there’s a system design section with tons of additional and outside resources. I don’t think you could say they are entirely diffe
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
I do think down the road we will compete head on but still disagree we do now. Our technology right now works for taking a range of A to a range of B outcomes in C time (which is the variable). We have a few hundred different micro sessions, and a few thousands different tasks, a few hundred assessments, a few dozens types of mock interviews. And every week we pull out a set of things that fit your schedule that you need to work on to improve that week. This is all the stuff to get from "1-3 years industry experience at decent company" to high performance top tier company. But if we expand this library of tasks and sessions we can really support a much wider range of transitions.
I'm happy to go over more details about what we do specifically or maybe chat with Chris G or another person you can find that went through the full gamut.
Maybe on paper these words sound similar but our bar is very very high. I don't mean this to be condescending towards Codesmith. Our team has spent spent years and years and years (cumulatively well over 100 years) amongst very senior high performing top engineers at not just Facebook but all the top companies and we hold people to a very high standard with nothing in between. This isn't meant to discount Codesmith's outcomes whatsoever, or the fact that some people have gone to FAANG companies from Codesmith. Codesmith doesn't have a single extremely staff/principal engineers+ on staff and Will Sentance explicitly wants to hire back Codesmith alumni to teach and explicitly not hire these aforementioned people. If Codesmith alumni go to Google and come back and teach part time a year later, that's fantastic (we have two or three similar cases at Formation) but our typical bar is people who have been at Google/Top Tier for 5+ years (preferable 10 to 20 years) and done hundreds or thousands of interviews. We had to fundraise from investors to be able to pay 5-6 engineers like $150K to $200K salaries a year to work for us and those are still massive pay cuts because they want to support Sophie's vision. Additionally you'll do mock interviews on system design with a principal engineer at Reddit, for example, one of the highest ranking roles in the industries. You'll do technical behavioral with people like Philip Su. A typical person will do real mock interviews with (I pulled up the list for someone recent): a staff II engineer at Uber, a senior engineer at Amazon, a senior engineer at Google, a staff engineer at Meta, a staff engineer at Airbnb. Like people who have done hundreds of interviews really identifying what you need to work on and we will help you practice in those areas and iterate every week. More junior FAANG interviewERS make a lot of mistakes actually and we are taking on the really senior engineers to do really incredible interviews.
We basically call Formation a "personal trainer". We aren't a 9 to 5 school to get into shape following a program and helping you through it. We are your personal trainer that is hyper focusing on getting you personally into shape. Some people don't need that, some people do and everyone's body and life is different and they need different things.
(Edited to reword discussion are "the bar")